empt, and I do not think much
of them myself. But do you think the sort of style and metre
suitable?"

He went steadily on till he completed the poem, and on April 27th I
received a packet endorsed "Patched-up Moschus returned herewith." So
far as I know, this version of the _Europa_, conducted with great spirit
in his seventieth year, has never been published. It is the longest and
most ambitious of all his poetical experiments.

Lord Cromer was fond of saying that he considered the main beauty of
Greek poetry to reside in its simplicity. In all his verses he aimed at
limpidity and ease. He praised the Greek poets for not rhapsodising
about the beauties of nature, and this was very characteristic of his
own eighteenth-century habit of mind. His general attitude to poetry,
which he read incessantly and in four languages, was a little difficult
to define. He was ready to give lists of his life-long prime favourites,
and, as was very natural, these differed from time to time. But one list
of the books he had "read more frequently than any other" consisted of
the _Iliad_, the Book of Job, _Tristram Shandy_, and _Pickwick_, to
which he added _Lycidas_ and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. It would
require a good deal of ingenuity to bring these six masterpieces into
line. He was consistent in declaring that the 28th chapter of Job was
"the finest bit of poetry ever written."

He was violently carried away in 1912 by reading Mr. Livingstone's book
on _The Greek Genius_. It made him a little regret the pains he had
expended on the Hymns of Callimachus and the Bucolics of Theocritus,
and he thought that perhaps he ought to have confined himself to the
severer and earlier classics. But surely he had followed his instinct,
and it would have been a pity if he had narrowed his range. It was the
modernness of the Alexandrian authors, and perhaps their Egyptian
flavour, which had justly attracted him. He did not care very much for
an antiquity which he could not revivify for his own vision. I urged him
to read a book which had fascinated me, _The Religion of Numa_, by a
learned American, the late Mr. Jesse Carter. Lord Cromer read it with
respect, but he admitted that those earliest Roman ages were too remote
and cold for him.

Lord Cromer was very much annoyed with Napoleon for having laid it down
that _apres soixante ans, un homme ne vaut rien_. The rash dictum had
certainly no application to himself. It is true that, und